Air Rights: Stitch N Bitch with Coralina Rodriguez Meyer

Saturday, April 7th
Stitch’n’bitch, noon – 4pm at Flux Factory
Flag Raising, 5pm at The Windmill Community Garden
across the street from Flux Factory!

Cunt Quilt Air Rights Statement

The Cunt Quilt is the official flag for the City of Today for Feminine Urbanism to be flown at FluxFactory’s Air Rights space. Airing the nation’s laundry after the 2016 US election, the artist began a national Underwear Audit to collect worn-out women’s underwear to sew onto Queen-sized bedsheets by feminists at quarterly craft gatherings. Born on protester’s backs at marches, the quilts represent an intersectional women’s movement. A performance of citizenship in three acts; the Underwear Audit accounts for our bodies, the Stitch n Bitches build feminist solidarity, and the Cunt Quilt holds our governing bodies accountable. The project will continue until there is a woman in the Whitehouse.

Like the Queens immigrant community (unwavering in the face of brutal forces), the Air Rights Cunt Quilt occupies a marginal, yet symbolic space in a larger movement. The Cunt Quilt migrates its origins from the “Arpilleras” (South American sculptural quilts) craft tradition to North America. Arpilleras originated during the modern Chilean genocide and spread across marginalized communities. The forbidden narrative textile reliefs were a form of political resistance and economic independence made by mourning indigenous mothers with clothing scraps from their “Desaparecidos” (disappeared) children. Arpilleras were performed at protests and sold as subversive souvenirs depicting everyday life under the Pinochet dictatorship. Translated to the North American context – where quilt history ranges from Betsy Ross’ first American flag, to Sojourner Truth’s underground railroad maps and Suffragette sewing circles; the Cunt Quilts are a guide to building solidarity and making invisible women’s power present in North American politics.

Air Rights

While air rights are conventionally framed in terms of potential real estate development, the term legally defines who may “control, occupy, or use the vertical air space above a property.” Playing with this idea, air rights here point to the value of (vertical) community space as a site for creative expression, stemming from the first amendment of the Bill of Rights. In this series, artists are invited to occupy the air space traditionally reserved for governments, symbols of nationhood, and real estate developers, exercising their first amendment right to freedom of speech.

Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is an indigenous South-American Brooklyn based artist who translates structural violence into minority heirlooms. Raised queer between the rural American South and the Caribbean, she mends her mixed-race, latinx, semi-able identity into satirical booby-traps. Coralina performs her citizenship by engaging viewers to become builders of their humorous, hysteric future. She began building the City of Today for Feminine Urbanism in 2009 to propose intimate solutions for urban scale problems. After studying painting at MICA, she completed her architecture BFA at Parsons (2004), and studio art MFA at Hunter College (2013). Coralina held fellowships at the Artist’s Institute NY, SU Florence Italy and the UDK Berlin to study Nazi utopian architecture with Hito Steyerl. In 2012 she researched her Inca heritage at the Museo de Sitio Machu Picchu fellowship, to create works connecting the khipu social structures to urban American iconography. She has been a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. Coralina received awards from VSA Arts, the Kennedy Center, NYFA, Scholastics and Young Arts. She has been featured in the NY Times, Village Voice, Hyperallergic, Paper Magazine, Univision, Nylon Magazine and Jezebel. Coralina’s work has been exhibited at Bronx Museum, Miami Art Museum, the Smithsonian Museum International Gallery, Miami University Museum, Kunstlerhaus Brethanien Berlin, NYU Kimmel Center, Bitforms, Andrew Edlin, AIR gallery, KMAC Museum and the Corcoran.